Digital Dollar Project launches a project with Ripple

The Digital Dollar Project has announced the launch of a sandbox program to kick off the probe of technical implementations of the planned digital currency.

Digital Dollar Project for the new U.S. CBDC

The Digital Dollar Project is launching a technical sandbox program for the central bank’s (CBDC) digital currency in October. The U.S. private sector program is initially partnering with Digital Asset, EMTECH, Knox Networks, and Ripple to explore cross-border payments.

The Digital Dollar Project is a partnership between Accenture (NYSE: ACN) and the Digital Dollar Foundation to expose the possibilities of the implementation of a U.S. Central Bank (CBDC) digital currency. The purpose of the project is to encourage research and public discussion on the potential benefits of a digital dollar, convene thought leaders and private sector actors, and propose possible models to support the public sector.

According to a press release on Wednesday, this new project with Ripple and three other crypto companies, which is expected to kick off this October, plans to bring together the private and public sectors to evaluate CBDC’s infrastructure solutions.

The release goes on to explain that project participants will have the opportunity to examine real-world technology and investigate implications for business strategies and those of other users. Participants will also conduct tests to determine possible use cases.

Jennifer Lassiter, executive director of The Digital Dollar Project, told the press the goal of this important partnership project: 

“Answer key questions about how the technology could work, the problems we hope to solve, and the ultimate business and individual outcomes we want to achieve”

What the new program consists of

The nonprofit Technical Sandbox program is also a natural outgrowth of what Biden decided at the signing of the executive order on cryptocurrencies in March this year, in which the need to join forces to understand the benefits and prospects of a possible future U.S. CDBC were specifically defined.

The United States, on the other hand, is one of the countries currently in the initial stage of their study on the implementation of Sun CDBC, while other states, such as Russia and China, are reportedly already at the final stage. 

Federal Reserve Chairman Jerome Powell, who has always been quite skeptical about the possibility for now of a new digital dollar, seems to have changed his mind in June, claiming that the time had come to initiate a serious and thorough study of the possibilities of a new U.S. CDBC.

Earlier this year, moreover, the Office of Financial Research (OFR) – an arm of the U.S. Treasury Department that explores risks to the financial system – said that a digital dollar could be of great help in stabilizing a financial system, which is showing obvious signs of collapse on the inflation front.

In short, according to experts, this important partnership could point the way to the new way forward for the testing of a new digital dollar, also aimed at countering the state-of-the-art projects in that direction by Russia and China.